WE FACED EACH other with shirts off and fists cocked, like the men we had seen in the camps, like the fabled pugilists of old. Our fists were clenched tight, the knuckles white with tension, our faces set and serious. Around us was a broken circle of travelling men. One or two urged us on. We moved closer. I felt no nerves, no fear: I was born for this. Bare fists hit bare flesh. It was my first organised bareknuckle fight. I was twelve years old.
My opponent, Pete Taylor, was about my age. Our dads had agreed to let us fight in a field at Polesworth in the West Midlands and a few men gathered round to watch: a fight always draws a crowd, no matter what the age of the participants. We flailed away at each other for twenty minutes until they declared it a draw. My reward was a slap on the back from my dad.
Within months I had fought several more lads: John Green, Freddie Turnbull, a little Geordie tough nut whose father Billy had once fought the great Johnny Winters, and Harry ‘Tightskin’ Smith, whom I boxed with gloves on the common at Muckley Corner, a roundabout on the A5 near Lichfield. My dad organised that. Smith hurt me – he was about sixteen and I was only thirteen – but they didn’t let it come to a conclusion. His brother Ernie did say, ‘Bartley’s a proper minute man,’ meaning a boxer.
Most I organised myself, because of my grandfather and the name of my breed. I was Bartholomew Gorman, heir to the traditions of Boxing Bartley and Bulldog Bartley. Peter Lee, the same age as me but a bit heavier, was a descendant of Wiggy Lee, a great old-timer who had lost to my grandfather, and Peter and I re-enacted their earlier battle when we fought at Llangefni in North Wales. A small posse of young lads watched us.
‘Show him what old Bartley Gorman can do,’ shouted my cousin Kevin.
‘Show him what old Wiggy Lee can do,’ shouted Peter’s brother John.
My dad had taken me out of school. I suppose he thought it was time for me to earn my keep; he had started barn-painting and needed us to help. We went back on the road, travelling a lot, mainly to East Anglia to paint agricultural buildings. We would sit in the back of the van on the paint tins – me, Sam and my cousins Clarence and Kevin – while my dad or my Uncle Bartley drove us around farming areas looking for work. We had a pedal-operated pump and a 100-foot hose to spray the paint. It was hellish work for children. We used tar on some of the roofs and in the hot summers, with my fair complexion, it would burn the skin off me. I was paid five shillings a day while the older boys got more. We painted Dutch barns, aircraft hangars, abattoirs, cattle markets, you name it. It was so lonely painting remote buildings: sometimes we didn’t see another person for days. My dad would give us a pound of cheese and a loaf of bread for the whole day and if we didn’t eat that, we starved. We never took anything we shouldn’t have. ‘If you lift so much as a nail or a screw, I’ll kill you,’ my dad would warn.
In my mid-teens we were working in Wales and answered my father back. He came up and put a dent in my head with a drain rod. I staggered in a daze – though I didn’t go down – and some farmhands carried me into a milk parlour, smothered in blood. We had to leave the job because I was in such a state. At the hospital they wanted to put six stitches in my head but my father wouldn’t allow it because he didn’t want anyone to say that Samuel Gorman had given his son stitches. They bandaged me up instead and my dad was so sorry afterwards that he gave me a diamond ring and let me drive the van back, the big Bedford with bumblebee windows. When my Uncle Bartley saw what he had done, it took ten men to hold him off my dad.
Our base was a disused quarry on the edge of Welshpool, a small town in mid-Wales. We stopped our trailers under the face of the quarry, which rose in a sheer rock wall. A steam train ran by into the town to the market to fetch cattle and sheep and pigs. It was a sheltered spot and would be our home for several years. We had television and electricity and my mother would cook with a calor gas oven. In summer we sometimes had a fire outside and we would sit around listening to tales of Ireland, of leprechauns and how you could never catch them, of the crying banshee, the old songs and the old places. Travellers are terrible people for seeing ghosts, and the Irish are the worst of all. To them, Ireland was an enchanted land where inexplicable things were commonplace.
They often told the story of my great-grandfather sitting by the gleads (embers) of a campfire at a crossroads in Ireland when everyone was abed, and how a woman in white appeared. He bade her goodnight but she glided past silently. A few minutes later, she returned. My great-grandfather kept two bull terriers in a box under the wagon and he let them out. The woman, he said, turned into a goose in the lane and pecked the dogs’ eyes out. My great-grandfather ran into the wagon and the yelping dogs bolted and were never seen again. The next morning they found feathers all around the lane.
These stories might seem absurd to house-dwellers but, believe me, you see strange things when you camp in isolated fields and travel down deserted lanes and bridleways. We would huddle around the flames to listen and then would have to go back to our beds, trembling.
I made my first trip to Ireland on a cattle boat with my father when I was fourteen. As we came in and could see the lights of Dublin, a man was singing I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. I felt I was returning to my homeland. It struck me how poor Ireland was; there were few cars, just bikes. And I remember giant policemen walking in pairs. When I returned years later, the policemen were smaller and there were no bikes but plenty of motor vehicles.
On Sundays, after Mass, our friends the Evanses would come over with a wind-up gramophone and there would be singing and tap dancing. We also had our own sports. One was standing jumps with half-bricks in your hands, which you would swing to gain extra momentum. Some could cover over thirty feet in three jumps. Sometimes you had to clear a canal lock from a standing start, again with the bricks in your hands. We also had our version of the high-jump, which was to try to vault a five-bar gate. Occasionally you even came across a seven-bar gate, though that was real Olympic standard. My dad was very keen on ‘flapping’: you make a track in a field, tie a rabbit skin to a thin rope and reel it in on an upturned bicycle wheel while the dogs race to get it first. We coursed hares and rabbits, poached and fished. I was in the rivers all the time; I knew every inch of the Severn.
Some of the men liked to fight gamecocks. Though I did it too, I think now it is terribly cruel. They would cut off the legs of the cocks to see if they tried to walk again – they called it ‘treading the ends’ – and if they did it proved they were brave enough to mate. I learned the names of all of the different breeds and types: American Fliers, Old English Game, Black Red, Silver Duckwing, Lemon Pile, Ginger, Wheaton, Indian Asieal, Japanese Sharma. The Black Reds were the best of all, I’d say; like a fowl version of a bull terrier.
Our biggest thing was to go to the pictures: they had a singalong with the words on the screen before the main event, which we always enjoyed. Our family bonds were very close; sometimes too close. Our parents could be very possessive, even with the young men, and by now we wanted to spread our wings. We were into the fashions of the day, with quiff haircuts, pencil ties, drainpipe trousers and winkle-picker shoes.
We were also very interested in fighting and listened rapt to stories of the great knuckle men. My Uncle Bartley, who lived with us, was a top man with very quick hands. I have a very rare photo of him squaring off against Joe Lock in Lancashire, one of the few pictures of an old-time gypsy fight still in existence. Uncle Bartley won after a close contest. He had a hard life; he’d once been up in court for desertion after he’d left his wife and family to try to make some money. He told the court that he could not live without his child, and the chairman of magistrates said, ‘Then you had better go back and make love to your wife,’ which must be the first time in history two people have ever been ordered by a court to do so! His wife, Ivory, died when she was thirty-eight and left him with eleven children. He had called from a phone box to see how she was and fainted inside it when they told him she had died.
He, my dad and others passed on the stories of fighters around the fireside, as man has done since ancient times. They talked of men like Benny Marshall, one of the forgotten greats. He was born in 1906 in Monmouthshire, and won the British ABA welterweight title in 1926, before turning pro. He was a magical stylist who often boxed with his hands down by his sides, defying his opponents to hit him. As a professional he went unbeaten for several years, but was so good that the leading British boxers avoided him. In disgust, he sailed for Australia to fight one of the greatest Aussie boxers of all time, Jack Carroll, the number one contender for the world welterweight title. Benny was stopped in the tenth round with a badly cut eye, his first defeat. He won his next fight but was then badly knocked out in two rounds by a very good middleweight, Jack Haines. He returned to England, won a few more fights, then disappeared off the scene, travelling around the world. Even in his old age, Benny could walk on his hands for a quarter of a mile. He also fought with bare fists, though he wouldn’t tackle my grandfather because he was too heavy for him.
There are many forgotten gypsy fighters of the Twenties and Thirties and one of my reasons for writing this book was to record their names before they are lost. One of my uncles says the best was a heavyweight called Jimmy O’Neill, from Lancashire, but I have been unable to find out anything about him, except that he was known as the ‘Bolton Thunderbolt’ and packed in boxing to go hawking. Strong John Small, the champion of Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, would always challenge his opponents at 6am, not a minute before or after, and was never beaten. Chris Royals, from Worcestershire, would walk into a field of pea-pickers and challenge them all; he had a poster at the end of his lane saying, ‘All challengers welcome’.
Reilly ‘Jumbo’ Smith was a heavyweight boxer who some said was the best man of his day. ‘I’d fight Carnera,’ he used to say, referring to Primo Carnera, the giant world champion. But his favourite saying was, ‘Two men meet before two mountains’, meaning mountains will never fight because they are immobile, whereas men will. Smith was one of sixteen children. He did his roadwork in old army boots, running behind a horse and cart, and kept two bears that he wrestled.
Reilly beat Edwin Nunn and La-la-loo Lee, among others. His most famous fights were against Charlie Bacon, a young bull who beat Smith at Cambridge Fair in the late Thirties after a family dispute. Smith’s brother, Ben, picked him up with tears in his eyes, but Reilly said, ‘Don’t cry over me. Next time we meet I will beat this man.’
They fought again in a field at Six Hills, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. Old Bill Elliott, Reilly’s uncle and one of the great fighters of my grandfather’s day, was there shouting, ‘Shera him, shera him’, which means hit him in the head. The fight was stopped early when Smith ripped open Bacon’s left eye with a right hook. Over 100 travellers had gathered to watch it and Reilly apologised for the quick finish, saying, ‘Sorry, gentlemen, that the entertainment didn’t last longer.’
Johnny Winters was a six-foot-three, rawboned man from the Nottinghamshire area who looked like a tougher version of Jack Palance. Many were scared of him. He never moved off the spot when he fought. Winters had two classic contests with ‘Whiteface’ Tommy Allen, a clever, scientific fighter from the same area. My grandad used to point out Allen and say, ‘See him? He’s going to the ’formatory [reformatory]’, because Allen was always in trouble. And he did.
Allen was stopping on a site at Walsall and Winters’s mother was there. They were queuing to get water from a tap when the old lady left her can for a minute. When she returned, Allen had moved her can and filled his own first and Mrs Winters was upset. A few words were exchanged.
‘There is no good you talking to me,’ said the old woman angrily. ‘I’ve got a son can talk to you.’
‘Fetch your son then,’ said Allen.
Two days later, Allen was lying on his bed in a wagon when a man came to the door.
‘Are you in there?’ came the shout.
‘What can I do for you?’ said Allen.
‘I’m Johnny Winters.’
‘Oh aye.’
‘I hear you were cheeky to the old woman the other day.’
‘Yes, but she was a bit cheeky to me.’
‘Well, I have come here to settle it. You don’t talk to my mother, you talk to me.’
‘It will be a pleasure.’
Allen was slim, about twelve stone, while Winters was fifteen stone, but Allen was confident he could beat anyone. They fought for fifteen minutes and for the first ten Allen cut Winters to ribbons. Then Winters found his weak spot. Allen had ulcers and when Winters hit him in the stomach, he started to fetch up blood. So Winters hit him in the belly again and again and they had to stop it. They met at Doncaster some time later and fought again. This time Allen hit Winters over the towbar of a trailer and cut him terribly but Winters beat him again the same way.
Sam Ward and Jim Crow were two unbeaten fighters from Darlington. Ward was wiry but hit like a mule: it was said he could break a bone wherever he hit you and his arms were so long they nearly touched his knees. He never looked for a fight but never reneged on one either and his sister could fight too. Sam was fighting at a fair in 1940 when a man crept up behind him with a shovel. His sister sparked the man out in front of 300 witnesses. Crow was more stocky but tough as leather: he beat a man called Jack Smith while suffering from pneumonia. Another extraordinary, unbeaten fighter was Little Adam Lee from Blackpool. He was fifteen stone but only 5ft 3in, and would grab men by the waistcoat, plant his feet on their thighs, pull himself up and nut them.
It was men like this I was raised to admire. They took pride in themselves and the way they dressed. They stood tall. My father used to hit me in the back many a time to make me stand straight. Johnny Winters dressed in fifty-bob suits, blue serge, with the seam on the outside of the thigh loose by one inch. They had six rows of stitching around the turn-up, patch pockets each with two pleats and a buttoned flap, and three rows of stitching around the lapel. The back of the jacket had a belt and two big seams. They’d put on a grey smock when they were hauling the oil cloth and carpets.
My uncle Ticker, also known as Tiger Gorman, was 6ft 1in and 15st and usually sported a velour hat with a twelve-inch brim, a Crombie coat down almost to the floor and black-and-white two-tone brogues. I believe he was the best knuckle man of his day. He also had over 200 fights as a boxer in the fairground booths, was never on the canvas and once floored the future world light-heavyweight champion Freddie Mills. The booths were then an integral part of travelling fairs and were one way for a gutsy man to make money in hard times. They had elaborately painted wooden fronts and the boxers would line up while a barker challenged men in the crowd to fight them. If you lasted say, six rounds, you might earn £1. Many would have a go but the booth boxers knew their stuff. If there were no takers they would have to box each other to entertain the crowd.
Uncle Ticker once fought a booth veteran called Sam McVey, the ‘Coloured Wonder’, for twelve rounds at Nottingham Goose Fair. Ticker had been on his uppers and hadn’t eaten a thing for a couple of days. At the end of the contest he shouted out, ‘Feed me and I will knock him out in two rounds.’ Ticker was a demon with bare fists. In his old age, he took on a fighter called Jimmy Brazil who had hit Ticker’s son with a jack handle and put twenty stitches in his head. Ticker went up to sort it out and Brazil hit him in the ribs with a jackhammer. Ticker took it, said, ‘Is that the best you can do?’ and slaughtered him.
These were the best men in England and there were good fighters close by in Wales too. Johnny Price, a scrap dealer from Newtown and my dad’s friend, was only twenty-eight when he was kicked to death by two men after a prize-fight. Black Bob Evans was another we knew well. He rarely removed his topcoat and would dig his heels in the ground in hobnail boots so they couldn’t knock him back. Any one of these men would be worth a book in their own right.
My grandfather could fight until his dying day. In his old age Bulldog Bartley used to stop at Minera mountain near Wrexham. He went to the pub one night when he was sixty-five and in there was a local bully called Bill Johnston who worked in a foundry. He spotted my grandfather sitting quietly in a corner.
‘You’re going to buy me a drink, gypsy.’
‘No I’m not,’ said my grandfather.
‘You are going to buy a drink or I will put you out on your ear.’
My grandfather went to the toilet and Johnston followed him. ‘You’re going to buy me a drink when you go back into the bar,’ he said.
As Johnston turned to walk back, my grandfather hit him on the sly and knocked him flat out. He then went back through the pub, picked up his coat and left. When he got further down the road he realised he had picked up Johnston’s coat by mistake and there was £3 in it. He went back to the same pub a few days later to return the jacket and they welcomed him like a hero. Johnston was never seen in there again.
Yet my grandad said that if he had his life over again he would never raise his fists. He used to sit for hours by the fire, trying to straighten his broken nose. ‘That’s how you’re going to end up,’ my dad would tell me. Bulldog Bartley died in 1955 in a Standmore trailer at Muckley Corner, near Lichfield, and was buried at Wrexham beside his mother.
The tales we heard of these men filled us with youthful enthusiasm. My wiry body was filling out, Sam was also shooting up, and we loved to spar with our battered old boxing gloves or engage in trials of strength like picking up telegraph poles. We used to speculate on what we wanted to be. Many said ‘Elvis Presley’ but I always said I wanted to be the best barefist fighter in the world.
*
WHEN I WAS sixteen we went hare-coursing on Cerrigydrudion mountain near Llanrwst, by the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales. I had a little Ford van, driving with learner plates in my winkle-picker shoes. A crowd of us went, dogs and all, in the van and a pick-up truck, and we met our cousins the Bryans, including Owen Bryan, said to be the best fighter in North Wales at the time.
As I have said, coursing was, and is, a popular pursuit among travellers, as this newspaper report describes:
Illegal coursing starts once the corn is off the fields in September. It usually takes place at dawn or dusk, although if the group is big enough it can happen in broad daylight with impunity. The flat lands of East Anglia provide perfect venues for opportunist gatherings. If the coast is clear they simply open a farm gate, drive in and let the dogs out.
The dogs will be large lurchers, usually greyhounds crossed with salukis. Owners decide between them whether they want to run their dogs ‘single-handed’ – one dog slipped alone on one hare – or ‘double-handed’, with two dogs. Sometimes bets are struck on how long it will take one dog to kill, say, five hares. Coursers walk the fields and slip the dog as soon as a hare breaks cover.
Let me say it takes a very good dog to kill a hare alone. Anyway, there must have been fifty of us at the mountain. After a lot of coursing and killing, Owen Bryan said to my dad, ‘I will race you for four pounds.’
It was a ridiculous thing to say. Owen was sitting on the back of an old ‘bouncer’ lorry with the tailboard down.
My dad said, ‘Fifty pound, never mind four pound.’
‘Don’t talk like a c* *t,’ said Owen.
‘Who’s a c**t?’ said dad.
The answer was a smash straight in the mouth from Owen, the best man in North Wales. My dad was forty-three, Owen about thirty. At it they go. Neither took their shirts off, they just fought straight off. We were all dumbstruck.
Another cousin, Big Tony, put up his hand. ‘Hang on Owen. He’s an old man to you. I’ll fight you.’
Tony wasn’t a fighting man but he loved my dad. The minute he said it, another of the Bryans stepped in and said, ‘No you won’t. I’ll fight you.’
So now there were two bareknuckle fights on this wild Welsh mountain and we were all shouting at the tops of our voices for one fighter or another. The farmers heard the commotion and came from different farms. They thought there was a riot on their land. They broke it up and we all headed back home amid bad feeling and muttered threats.
One of the Bryans had left his vehicle at our site and came back for it. My dad was waiting with no shirt on.
‘Where’s Owen?’ he asked.
No sooner had he said that than in walked Owen, stripped off with his hands taped up, ready to fight. My dad knocked him down with the first punch. Owen got up and they went at it. It was a terrible fight; women were watching it from the trailers with their hands over their mouths in horror. Someone wrapped a dog lead round my dad’s neck and I went to step in, at sixteen. Owen’s brother, Dave, who was twelve years older than me, put his hand out to stop me, saying, ‘Hang on.’
I destroyed him with a volley of punches.
My cousin Caroline Stevens, who was just fourteen, came out with a shotgun and stopped the fighting. No-one had really noticed what I had done to Dave, as they had all been watching my dad and Owen. As the men stood back, panting for breath, I stepped forward.
‘I’ll fight you,’ I challenged Owen.
He looked at me with contempt. ‘No,’ he said, ‘my brother will fight you.’
‘I’ve just beat him.’
I saw disbelief in Owen’s eyes. He looked around and saw his brother, battered. The disbelief turned to shock. Still, he refused my challenge.
‘I’ll wait till you grow up, old lad.’
‘Never mind when I grow up. I’ll fight you now.’
I was ready and I believed I could beat him. I will always regret that I hadn’t stopped my father and fought Owen myself.
It wasn’t over yet. Big Tony resumed his earlier fight but lost when his opponent put pennies between his fingers and cut him up. They weren’t friends again for years afterwards, though now it is all forgotten. I’ll say this for Owen: he was a very good fighter and afraid of no-one.
That incident made my mind up. We erected a gym in a shed and I started to train every day. I was going to be gypsy champion. The others didn’t believe me but I knew I had something different, a power that others did not possess. It would take another incident to make them realise.
*
IN THE MIDDLE of Welshpool is a clock tower and across the road is a public house. One night we were standing under the tower, talking, when some men came out of the pub. They were Welsh farmers and most of them were in their forties. I was with John Stevens and Clarence Gorman, my cousins, both a few years older than me but neither of them fighters. I was sixteen, in my red jeans.
These Welshmen came around us; they fancied pushing around the gypsy lads. One of them, a notorious man called Tanner, started picking on Clarence. Another one singled me out.
‘Are you eyeing my mate up?’
‘No, I’m not eyeing anybody up,’ I replied.
‘You were.’
‘What would you do if I was?’
He pushed me. I pushed him back. He fumbled for something in his pocket and I saw a glint of metal. He’s got a knife, I thought.
Without pausing, I hit him with a single right hand shot so fast it was a blur. He flew backwards and his head hit the concrete. He was unconscious. His knife clattered on the pavement. His nose was almost cut in two between the nostrils and his mouth. One of his legs twitched. Nobody else moved a muscle. They were all in shock.
‘Anybody else want any?’ I asked.
Johnny Stevens, his eyes wide with wonder, stage-whispered to me in Cant, ‘Let’s go, we are going to get it.’
We walked back to the camp. The others were worried about comebacks, so we made a big fire in the quarry and waited all night for the gang to come and fight us. Nothing happened. I went back into town not long afterwards and I didn’t get any more trouble.
My days of taking beatings from my father were also coming to an end. I couldn’t love anybody more than my dad but as I got older we had terrible rows. One day he came to hit me with a stick and I took it off him, broke it and said, ‘Never touch me again.’ And he didn’t. A few days later, I was having a boxing spar with him in the quarry and I opened up on him. He was overwhelmed. My aunt stopped it and said, ‘You ought to have better sense.’ I regretted it afterwards, but I had crossed a threshold.
You cannot thwart destiny. Around this time I went down to the cinema and saw a newsreel of this handsome, articulate, brash young man called Cassius Clay. He had won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics and was standing at the top of the Empire State Building in New York, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to be the champion of the world. He was really something.
I wanted to fight him. I also wanted to do in the prize-ring what he intended to do in boxing. Ahead of Clay lay the world champion, Sonny Liston, one of the most frightening men in the history of the ring. And in my way was a champion every bit as daunting: the man they called ‘Big Just’.